The process of deploying and operating IP telephony networks and services is often complex and raises several challenges and problems. Companies deploying such networks and services need information to determine which network resources (e.g. voice gateways and trunks on these gateways) are over-utilized or under-utilized, and thus identify which trunks or gateways are the top candidates for upgrade or downgrade procedures. Furthermore, adequate data is required as to what additional network capacity is needed and when it is needed for a particular trunk or gateway. This information is critical and relevant for many organizations, as they have contractual and financial agreements with service providers for long-distance PSTN and WAN services across specific trunks. Techniques to identify which trunks have problems related to capacity and whether the trunks are under-utilized or over-utilized can save companies a significant amount of money. Additionally, techniques to estimate future capacity and utilization on trunks and gateways may help the operations personnel to be more effective in budgetary planning for trunk and gateway upgrades and network changes and enable them to proactively fix potential problems in the future, thereby preventing such problems from becoming critical and service-impacting.
Some trunks in the network may have voice quality problems associated with them. It is important to identify these bad quality trunks for troubleshooting and proactively resolving the problems to ensure service quality is not affected. But such identification may not be easy or obvious using traditional network voice quality probes or softswitch (e.g. Cisco Unified CallManager) Call Detail Record (CDR) analysis. (CDRs contain information about the endpoints of the call and other call control/routing aspects. Softswitches can also generate Call Management Records (CMRs) that contain information about the quality of the streamed audio of the call).
Therefore, it is beneficial to provide tools and methods for network operators and administrators to identify over-utilized, under-utilized, and bad quality trunks and gateways in IP telephony networks.